


Down the Rabbit Hole

by Skiewrites



Series: Wonderland [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (damn), (that's a tag?), Bing - Freeform, Birthday, Confusion, Dreams, Dreams vs. Reality, Dreamscapes, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Galaxy Garrison, Gen, Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Keith hasn't dropped out yet, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pidge | Katie Holt Swears Like a Sailor, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Pinching, Self-Harm, Skype, Swearing, Tags Are Hard, Tags Contain Spoilers, Tags May Change, UGHHHHHHH
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-02-05 19:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12800382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skiewrites/pseuds/Skiewrites
Summary: Katie Holt was a lucky person. Both her father and brother were well known space explorers, she had a secure place at the Garrison, even if she didn't get along fully with her teammates and she had the kickass ability to hack into any database she wanted to. Life was going great! That is, until she wakes up from a dream about Pidge Gunderson, from how the Kerberos mission failed to flying through a corrupt wormhole while piloting a mechanical lion, and she begins to wonder if she is living through a reality, or if this is all a dream.Part two of 'Wonderland' Series





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> For this chapter, there is mentions of self-harm and swearing.

Groaning, Katie Holt sat up and rubbed her face, pushing the sleep dust out of the corners of her eyes, feeling strangely energized after the all-nigher that she pulled.

Huh, what a surprising turn of events.

Slowly stretching her aching muscles, she started to get ready for the day, getting changed from her night clothes into the ugly orange uniform that the Garrison decided that they simply must have and put her hair into a high ponytail so that it followed the Garrison’s regulations, letting her bangs fall into her face, frowning to herself as she could have sworn that she cut it all off-

Oh, wait, that was in her dream.

Her, surprisingly vivid and highly detailed, dream, where she piloted a mechanical lion from outer space with four other people (with their own lions, of course), and lived on a castle-ship thing with them and these two aliens, all of which were helping her find her brother and father, who were kidnapped by these other aliens during their journey to Kerberos, of which they were fighting an intergalactic war against, with the colour-coded (because what are we, animals?) mechanical flying lions that could become a bigger mechanical flying robot when combined that even had its own name: Voltron.

So, basically, Power Rangers in space mixed in with some Transformers shit.

Frowning slightly, she ran her hand through her long hair to remind herself that it was all still there as she entered the bathroom that was connected to her room, and brushed her teeth, staring into the mirror feeling as if there was something _off_ about her face, as if something was missing. Sighing when, after five minutes of staring at her face in the mirror, she gave up, deciding that she was not going to be comparing what she had been wearing in her dream to what her real life was.

 _Or maybe_ , she thought as she placed her tooth brush back into its cup, _this was all a dream and she’ll wake up again in her lion and wonder about the ridiculous dream she had about having a normal life._

It was too fucking early to be dealing with this level of deep thinking. She’ll leave that shit to Kogane, thank you very much.

Walking back into her room, Katie packed her bag for the day, filling it with the homework, textbooks, a notebook for her doodles and idle thoughts and the random project she’ll finish during one of her easier classes. Just as she was leaving the room, she backtracked, entering her room again only to cross off a day on her calendar, a gift from a grandparent for Christmas last year.

April 3rd. 

Happy birthday.

 

* * *

 

 

Life at the Garrison was something that Katie doubted that could be replicated anywhere in the world.

The way that they advertised it was that it was a military establishment, which want something that Katie was going to argue with. There were officers assigned here, and not only to teach, not that most of them wanted to be there, something that they made sure to remind the students on a daily basis.

So, yes, it was a military establishment, but it was also a school, though, the ages were varied, from 15, like herself, up to about 25, with all students learning more about space travel, training to be some of the only people of their time to leave their home planet and explore their solar system, and maybe even further with the leaps that technology was going. That being said, most of the students were 17-20 years old.

Meaning that, when Katie walked into her Communication’s class to see a girl crying over a dead meme, two people loudly arguing over quidditch being a legitimate sport and having a spot in the next Olympics and somebody in the front row furiously scribbling over their piece of paper, they obviously hadn’t done the homework, all she did was take her seat in the back of the class, not fazed in the slightest, and take out her notebook and began to let her pencil take over, doodling to her heart’s content, ignoring when the teacher, an older man who thought that the best way to control the class was to be their friend and not their commanding officer, asked the class to settle down and to give in their homework.

Not that it worked, but at least a small gold star can be given for effort.

Sighing as she let her head hit the table, Katie bit back a large groan while continuing to doodle as the class went on to talk about the teacher’s, whose name had completely slipped Katie’s mind for some reason, private life to stop them from having to do much work.

She had decided to come to the Garrison because she wanted to be challenged, wanted to be pushed further than when she skipped grades at school, than when she had planned the most complex of pranks that caused her name to go down in school history the year that she left, more than when she decided that she was going to learn all the programming languages she could get her hands on and then make one that was 10 times better and more logical than the shit that everyone else was using.

She did not come here to listen to some bullshit about how the commander’s (what was his name, it was on the tip of her tongue, she was sure of it) youngest child had just their fourth birthday. If she _really_ wanted to know, she’ll just hack into the Garrison’s systems and find out for herself; it wasn’t like it was that hard.

Then the bell is going off, and there is a flurry of activity as everyone packs up their empty notebooks as they rush off to their next lessons, or, if they’re lucky, a study period. Picking up her own notebook, she closed it, ignoring whatever her subconscious mind decided was a good thing to draw.

Written on the now hidden page, ingrained onto the page in her large messy bubble writing, was something she could only think of as a dream.

_Voltron._

* * *

 

 

Katie had the weirdest feeling of being watched as she stood in line in the simulation room, vaguely listening to whatever Commander had been assigned to cover Iverson that day go on about good techniques that fliers should use when entering an atmosphere, stuff that didn’t really relate to her in the first place anyway.

Just because she had read all the flight manuals doesn’t mean that she’ll get behind the controls of even a cargo ship anytime soon.

(She held her breath as she was overtaken by the feeling of déjà vu.)

(What’s wrong?)

(Nothing’s wrong.)

(Everything’s right.)

“Hey Holt.”

Turning her head, Katie looked at Keith Kogane, an amazing pilot in the making and the leader of their group for the simulations, practically born to be better than anything that the Garrison can train, even Tadashi Shirogane.

(No, something was very wrong.)

(No, everything was okay.)

“So, it turns out that Hathaway has skivoliosis, for the third time this semester. So, for the third time this semester, we’re not going to be going into the sim.” Kogane muttered under his breath with enough anger that made Katie wince, making sure that neither the commander nor the others lines up with them could make out what he said as they watched the first group go into the simulator. She sighed in response, feeling oddly happy that she wasn’t going to be in the sims today.

Joshua Hathaway was the mechanic and the last member of their team, when he could be bothered to be around. When he was, he did not stop with the sexist comments, racist jokes, and crude humour as well as flirt with anything that has two legs and has something that resembles boobs. But, he was smart when it mattered, in the fact that he could fix anything to a decent standard in an emergency, which is all the Garrison really cared about. It wasn’t them that had to put up with his behaviour after all.

No, it was her and Keith that had to deal with it.

“Jackass is lucky that he’s not here then.” She replied, keeping her eyes on the screen as the class watch the group inside fail tremendously at entering Mars’ atmosphere, as they ended up crashing, not only onto the planet, but onto one of the research bases.

The look on their faces showed that they knew that they were in for a walloping.

Katie did not pity them one bit.

So, instead of watching the team be dragged below their graves and into the depths of hell, Katie slyly glanced at her classmates, making sure to take a mental note of the ones who were smiling cockily at the team for their mistakes, the ones who were shaking in their Garrison grade boots in fear that they will be the next victim of the nameless commander.

Her eyes glided past Lance McClain, only to be drawn back to him.

She could have sworn he was in the cargo pilot class.

Keith hadn’t dropped out yet, or ever.

Next to the Latino was Hunk, who never seemed to have changed and he looked like he feared for his life, not that Katie blamed him because he always crashed the simulators (or did he, should couldn’t remember), and behind the pair of them was a clock, with no ticking hand, reading 13:67.

Was she dreaming.

She could have sworn that she woke up this morning.

Pinching herself, she frowned at the weird tingly sensation it created, instead of the sharp pain that she had been expecting.

“I didn’t take you to be a self-harmer.” Kogane muttered, looking straight down at her.

“I’m not.” Katie muttered back, staring at Lance, Hunk, and tall girl as they entered the simulator.

“What time is it?” Her pilot looked puzzled by question, but, nevertheless, he turned around to look above where Lance had just been standing.

“Just gone 12. Are you hungry for lunch for something?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”


	2. Two

Katie could not have been happier to have her birthday on a Friday.

She dazed through the rest of the day, attending her afternoon lessons, but she wasn’t fully there, as one moment she was eating the rather crappy lunch that the Garrison call food (though it seems rather bland and tasteless that evening, which was strange because, even if it was crappy, it usually had a strong crappy taste to go with it, but that afternoon it was almost like eating water, as she knew it was physically eating something, it just didn’t have a taste to it) and the next moment she’s in her dorm, sitting at her messy, paper filled desk, looking out into the dreary desert with absolutely no recollection of how she got there.

Looking at the darkening sky, she noted the deep red sun setting behind the yellow cliffs where, in her dream (her stupid dream), an alien robotic Lion laid resting until her chosen Paladin came and woke her up like some sort of sleeping beauty.

(It truly had been a stupid dream.)

The last thing she remembered was her lunch, meaning that she had lost almost five hours of her day. It was disorientating, as it was as if her soul had jumped into the future, giving her no time at all to process the fact that she had jumped forward in time.

And that, my friends, is when you should be starting to get concerned.

Katie ~~(Pidge)~~ Holt, however, just chalked it up to her lack of a proper sleeping schedule, and moved on with her life without a thought.

~~(She’ll regret it later, just you watch…)~~

Huffing, she opened up her battered laptop (ah, the places they’ve been together, the sites they’ve hacked and the memes they’ve made) and clicked onto her social media, going through all the ‘Happy Birthday’ comments and automatically liking them, even the paragraph that her mum put up about how her ‘baby’s getting so old’, not bothering to read any of it or take a note of any of the pictures her old school friends or her father had posted to mark the occasion. She had almost finished liking all the posts, making it out to be a chore (which it totally was), when a small, pale blue notification popped up in the right hand corner of the screen, distracting her from the gibberish that littered her screen.

She smiled brightly and clicked on it without hesitation, her eyes almost signing when the face of her older brother, Matt Holt, filled the screen, hiding the messages that congratulated her on surviving another year, something that she’ll probably click off anyway when she had finished the call to her brother.

It had become part of her weekly routine, waiting for a call from Matt every Friday evening, one of the only evening’s that Matt got off from the Galaxy Garrison’s research department, not that he would have it any way. He had tried space, and had told her that it just wasn’t for him the same way that it was for their father. The pilot for the mission, however, had agreed with Matt, so she had decided that they would become a test pilot instead for the engineers, meaning that, while she did fly the fast ships that could break at a moment’s notice, she wouldn’t have to leave Earth’s atmosphere ever again.

( ~~Pidge’s~~ mind went blank and she, she had forgotten the name of the pilot…)

(…She searched her mind for a proper answer, getting frustrated as she racked her brain for the answer…)

~~(Her name was…)~~

(Something was wrong, why had she forgotten something this important?)

~~(Her name was…)~~

(His name was Shiro. Shirogane Tadashi. Matt Holt’s best friend.)

(Suddenly ~~Pidge~~ could breathe again)

~~(Something was wrong here.)~~

“So how has the best little sister been on her birthday?” Matt smiled, blind to the mental struggle she just went through. Nevertheless, Katie smiled back at her laptop screen, confirming that, yes, she had had a decent day despite having to have lessons on it, and, yes, she did like the look of the new graphics card that he sent to her to upgrade her laptop. She pushed the fact that she didn’t remember what she did for half of the day or the fact that she forgot the name of her brother’s best friend or the really, really weird dream she had that stayed in the background of everything she did.

There were some things that she didn’t want to talk about to her older brother who happened to be the biggest weeb she had ever had the misfortune of meeting.

(And she loved him to the bottom of her heart because of it.)

(Enough to travel across the universe in a weird space robot cat if she ever needed to.)

(It really was a weird dream.)

From there, the conversation grew onto how their week had been, talking about the amount of homework and late nights they had, complaining about their teachers and their COs. It’s almost familiar, their conversation, as if their had already had it before, in a different lifetime or alternate universe, maybe. It wasn’t until Matt’s phone buzzed somewhere off camera, however, that a sense of dread slithered down her spine, settling in the pits of her stomach, resting there twitching, reminding her that it was there, that it wasn’t moving and that she would not be able to get it off her mind.

Katie watch curiously as Matt picked up the phone, reading what she presumed to be a message, frowning as he started blushing and quickly started to text back with a dopy looking smile on his face.

She got the feeling that this was not going to end well in any way shape or form.

But, it did make for some great teasing, and maybe blackmail, material.

“So, who you texting?” She asked, adding a small smirk to her face, watching in utter delight as his face went red as all the blood rushed to the surface in embarrassment, causing Katie’s eyebrows to crease, because he’s never done that before.

Has he met someone?

“Lauran. She was asking about when the new prototype would be safe enough to fly, and what sort of boosters it’s going to have.” He replied, not even looking up from his phone as he started to type with a speed only those who grew up with the technology could have. Katie, however, was left confused.

Who the fuck was Lauran?

“Who the fuck is Lauran?” She huffed leaning her head on her fist, a small smile crawling onto her face at the though of her older brother _finally_ losing his virginity.

“Lauran? Lauran Harris? You know, the pilot of the Kerberos mission?”

Pidge’s insides froze at the words, staring unblinking at the wall behind her while her brother went on about the story where she apparently met her for the first time almost a year before the mission.

A story that she has no recollection of, because, as far as she could remember, _Shiro_ had been the one who Matt and Dad brought home one evening, saying very loudly that he would be the reason that they didn’t make it back for dinner. _Shiro_ had been the one who brought Keith ‘no-middle-name’ Kogane along and that was how the two of them met. _Shiro_ had been the one to pilot the ship for the Kerberos mission, _Shiro_ had been the one to save her brother from the Galran gladiator rings, _Shiro_ had been-

Shiro had only been in Katie’s dreams, it seemed.

But the big question was, who the fuck was he, because there was no way that she had just made him up in her very illaberate dreams of aliens and spaceshiups.

(Another big question was who the quiznaking fuck Coran and Allura were, as well as every single alien they came across as their time as Paladins of Voltron, but, quiet honestly, maybe just answering the questions on Earth maybe better suited for now.)

“Of course, _that_ Lauran.” Katie muttered, interrupting Matt’s monologue. “Has she taken your virginity yet?” She asked innocently, fluttering her eyelashes and giving the most unknowing smile she could give, her eyes twinkling at her brothers spluttering on the other side of the camera, in a bedroom on the other side of the country.

(Once that seemed a far distance for Pidge, but after space, or at least, her dream about space, she had never felt more closer to her brother.)

It didn’t take long for him to hang up the call, only to get away from her merciless teasing.

Katie sighed as she hit her head against the table, the laptop sitting open in front of her, back to the webpage of the social media with the birthday messages still open, frowning at one of the messages that was on the top of her screen.

_Happy Birthday Katie! I hope you had a nice day. See you when you come back home – Lauran Haines._

Sitting up quickly, she opened a new tab, and Binged Lauran’s name, and was surprised to not only find herself confused when a picture of the launch day for the Kerberos mission appeared, but shocked when a picture of herself and a woman who she had never seen before in her life appeared, with both Dad and Matt standing in between them, as well as a man who looked to be in her 50’s and very proud of what was currently happening.

The woman, Katie assumed, was the Lauran Haines that Matt was smitten over.

Frowning, she did another search, putting in Shiro’s name, then full name and date of birth and then his surname before his given name and only getting pictures of many different Japanese men that were definitely not her Shiro before she decided to put Kerberos behind it, only to stare at the screen when a message say that there was nothing that matched her query popped up, leaving her with so many more questions than she had answers.

Who the fuck was Shirogane Takashi, and why did she know that name?

(She’ll need a nap, three cups of coffee and two cans of Monster before Pidge started to search properly, because she didn’t sleep well last night (if the dream was any indication) so some proper sleep for her self-imposed mission sounded like a good call.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I updated, but certainly not edited, which at the moment is a pretty good achievement as my depression is getting really bad lately.... Next to be updated with either be Hunk or Lance, though I'm not too sure about who's chapter.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/skiewrites)


End file.
